In an act of absurd flamboyance I licked his closed, bloody eye, it seemed like the fireflies were related to the moths, like the poem was related to the one-eyed turtle and that bleeding eye, like my love for all the men, was consummated in his chest, and amid the pathos all those thoughts led to, I washed his face, and we left holding hands and went to the river and that’s how we woke up, together, in silence, on the boardwalk. I couldn’t resist the beauty of his hands; I didn’t feel aroused but a melancholic ecstasy. He and the river were absolutely familiar to me even though all that landscape was foreign. When I left, he said I’m going to kiss you, just a kiss. It can’t be anything more than a kiss. And then the kiss was straight out of a telenovela, an openmouthed, passionate, tender kiss, a great kiss. I told him it will only be a lick of the chest, and that’s what it was, I licked his hairy chest, covered it in saliva while I was assaulted by primitive, beautiful thoughts: how could I love this man I’d just met? Of course it was possible. He gave me a slip of paper I saved, and I walked to the terminal. I can’t remember the song, which is truly unbearable. On the paper he’d written a simple poem, but its beauty touched me. I was in love with him, but that he told me he loves me in a poem renewed some faith or, perhaps, made me go back to an idea that was already circling, that had to do with failure and was tangentially related to the Fool and to that phrase that emerged after the retreat’s revelation: my failure as a premonition of the failure of everything possible, of any attempt made by me or anyone, without room for correction, improvement, or return, and it goes again. The rotten luck was that the man’s beauty had left me with a sensation of catastrophe in my body, above all from the magnitude of the blow that disfigured his eye and the way the beauty was maintained, unscathed, coming out of his chest hair. The thought of getting the bus in that state and seeing my husband, who in a gesture of sudden friendliness had offered to pick me up from the terminal, was unbearable. Luckily and as was his custom, he didn’t show up.